How to connect people to your digital transformation

Too often when I talk to people about IoT there’s a mental separation between the technology, the business process, and the people involved. Companies are getting much better at linking the technology to their business process, but it’s still really challenging to communicate the results of any automated alert or notification to a person.

ServiceNow, a software company that helps companies implement and track people-centric business processes, is trying to solve this challenge with a new platform designed to take machine and business data and turn it into what it calls a digital workflow. You or I might think of it as a notice that goes out to a service person, or even an alert that gets sent to a CRM system to update customers of a problem by way of an app.

The new platform from ServiceNow is called Connected Operations and is comprised of four segments. The first segment is a bridge that brings in data from connected devices and processes. The second is a rules engine where the business will try to explain to the software what happens when certain data parameters are met. As a simple example, if Sensor A on the printer detects Y, then the printer is out of paper.

The third segment is the operations incident, which takes the rules and generates a response for a person to handle. So in the example above, the realization that the printer is out of paper would generate a message to a specific person that would tell them to add more paper.

The final element is a series of connected workflows responsible for bringing in other data about the employee process to ensure that the person responsible for fixing the problem or acting on a notification has the tools they need. In our printer example, this might include a link to paper inventory and reordering systems, or even location data for the affected printer.

But while all of this feels really logical, as businesses scale and IoT implementations become more prevalent, implementing and tracking business processes becomes more challenging. So if your organization has 100,000 printers in 40 offices around the world, figuring out your paper inventory and keeping the printers stocked becomes more complex.

When it comes to monitoring equipment in the field, some companies might want to prioritize how they dispatch their repair people so non-essential equipment is fixed during normal working hours, allowing them to avoid paying overtime. A predictive maintenance program might not have that kind of context, but ServiceNow does.

Notably, ServiceNow doesn’t want to take the insights from a company’s connected sensors and machines; it wants the raw data. Jonathan Sparks, the company’s vice president of IoT and operations products, says that’s because, over time, ServiceNow will be able to draw even richer insights from said data, enabling it to suggest different processes to follow when certain problems are detected or to simply help customers detect problems earlier than they do now.

I want to be cynical and view this as just another effort to grab more data because data is the new oil. But there are numerous examples of companies that already bring in data from different customers and analyze it to figure out new best practices, warn of new trends across industries — even call out problems with particular equipment brands. The real question is whether or not customers will want to push all of their raw data into the ServiceNow platform.

Regardless, I’m heartened by the attention ServiceNow is paying to the human side of digital transformation. Without the ability to turn insights into action, the IoT is just an expensive and complicated alerting system. And while some jobs will be completely automated, there will still be so many places where humans will have to get involved in order to solve a problem. Organizing that involvement and making sure it scales will be just as important as getting machines onto a network.